Almost every entryway to a retail store or other commercial building includes a door. In addition to defining the boundary of the retail establishment, doors serve a variety of useful purposes including, among others, protecting the interior of the building from the elements. Thus, doors to most retail establishments are normally in the closed position. To enter the retail establishment, therefore, a patron must first open the door. In most cases this is accomplished by pulling the door toward the body. To assist the patron with this task, most doors have a handle attached thereto. By grasping and pulling the door handle, the patron can pivot the door around a hinged edge thereof, thereby opening the door with relative ease.
Typically, a door handle includes a knob, shaft or other member which is positioned several inches forward of a front side surface of the door. The handle is mounted to the door such that force applied to the handle is transferred to the door itself. To maximize transfer of force to the door while maintaining ease of use, the handle is typically positioned in proximity to a free edge of the door and about three feet above the bottom edge.
A door attachment closely related to the door handle is commonly referred to as a "push pad". Relative to the door handle, the push pad is mounted to the opposite side of the door, i.e., the side which must be pushed to open the door. Since the patron need not grasp or pull the push pad (as with a door handle) a push pad is typically elongated along its horizontal axis and often shortened along its vertical axis.
For most business establishments, door handles and/or push pads serve only the aforementioned task of assisting in opening doors. Thus, door handles and/or push pads are typically viewed as purely functional devices. To improve the appearance of a business establishment, door handles and push pads are sometimes ornately configured. Rarely, however, are these devices customized for a particular business by incorporating a company logo or other signage into the handle or push pad. Furthermore, those occasional prior attempts to do so have produced less than satisfactory results. Specifically, door handles having a metal exterior surface shaped to incorporate a company logo and painted to correspond to the company's color scheme are known. Not only are such door handles exceedingly expensive to manufacture, repeated touching of the door handle often causes the painted exterior surface to quickly appear worn, thereby resulting in added costs of frequent touch-ups.